Locator: 49926INVESTINGCLUB.
I've never liked the idea of belonging to an investing club. Early on, decades ago when I was just starting out, I though the idea of an investment club was a great idea.
But over time, I learned I was too opinionated to be a good member of such a club.
But now I have different ideas, thinking about my grandchildren, how I would do it. Obviouslyi they would need to be at least in junior or senior year of high school, and preferably well into college.
The meetings would last about an hour each week. More often if the members enjoyed the meetings.
They would be set up on the quarter system like Stanford, or the semester system like most other schools.
Initial sessions would be TED talks by each member telling their investment journey -- where they had been, where they are now, and where they are headed.
Probably two TED talks each week.
Once the TED talks had been completed, the one-hour sessions would be divided in half. The first 30 minutes a didactic session on investing, the one that the older granddaughters participated in with their father and with me.
The second thirty minutes would be on practical matters, making sure members had a checking / savings account, a brokerage account, and a Roth IRA, to get them started.
The semester would follow that format through to the end.
The second semester, the same group would meet again, same format. I assume the didactic portion would have reached some sort of end and we could now move on to a book club. We would assign two books for the second semester and tackle the books in bite-size bites, a couple chapters at a time. The second thirty minutes again would be dealing with practical matters but now we could get into more specific discussions on investing.
The key that makes this different than investing clubs of which I am familiar: there would not be a common "pot of money" or a "investment club account" in which folks would buy shares, and members would decide, as a group, which stocks to buy, hold, and sell.
Members would have their own brokerage accounts and manage those accounts themselves, though other members would offer as much or as little advice as an individual member would want.
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Investing or Trading
By its very name, "an investment club," means that members of the club would concentrate on buying with the intention of holding for a "long" time. "Long time" would mean different things to different folks but since this club would be a by yourself / member of a group, it would be up to the individual member how he/she would define "long." But active trading would be discouraged, I suppose.
I'm not a member of Jim Cramer's CNBC investment club but I bet it's quite similar. But "knowing" Jim Cramer, it's probably not a lot different than his television program, "Mad Money."